Building a studio.

I will be adding a 16'x20' extension to my shop to use as a recording studio,also I am going digital. I have some experience with analog from back in early 1980's so this is like starting from scratch. My question is what do I need to do to get this right ? My start up budget is $1000. This is just a hobby but I still want to make quality recordings.

Welcome to Reaper forum... I also record as a hobby and I started with far less than $1000. In fact, all I had was N-Track software, an electric guitar and a Digitech RP50 effects pedal which also had a metronome-like drum effect which I plugged directly into the line-in on my home PC. I then bought a cheap Radio Shack mic...then an acoustic guitar pickup, then a cheap mixer to plug everything into and fed its output to the RP50 plugged into the line-in on the PC. Eventually I picked up a nice condenser mic, a firewire 8 channel mixer, several more mics, more guitars, more speakers, keyboard, stereo receiver, 4 headsets, cables, power strips, etc..... My original setup (not counting already owned equipment -guitars, spkrs, receiver and keyboard) was Software $50 RP50 $50 RS mic $20 Peavey mixer on ebay $50 Sennheiser Headset $30 I'm not saying I have anything special or that my recordings are anything to compare to professional quality, but for the $$ you are talking about you should be able to get along pretty well. As far as exactly what you need, I suppose you will need to start researching depending on what type of recording you want to do..i.e. bands, drums, solo... That will dictate the type of mics, size of mixer (firewire/usb), etc. There are so many variables I doubt that it is possible to make a list. I suppose my point is that you can put in $100 up to a $1000 depending on what you want to do and still get pretty decent recordings. You will need basically Instrument/vocs > interface > PC/Mac > monitoring system. Variations of those and added features like room treatments as Graeme mentioned above, other hardware, etc will be your decision based on your own research. In response to your question, you can look here: cliff

With a budget like that you're going to need eBay (and patience) a lot. Assuming you already have an ok computer, your budget may look something like this (in rough priority order): Monitors $250 (try lots out in a shop then troll ebay for the ones you like) Room treatment $300 (DIY bass traps and some sort of quasi vocal booth) Large Diaphragm Condenser $150 Multichannel soundcard $150 (I can recommend a Delta 1010LT as a good entry level if you want 8 tracks. If you only want to record 2 tracks at a time, there's plenty of choice) Old Mixer $150 (Anything that'll give you phantom power and 8 tracks or more) It depends a lot on the style of recordings you're aiming at (solo, band, electro etc)

Hey...sorry Hillbilly....I didn't realize you wanted "professional quality" recordings. Buy a mic and some room treatments and a hard disk recorder. Have fun cliff

Nothing like talking crap and scaring people is there doh $1000 budget i would suggest get some nice nearfields and treat the room a little (Best you can afford) Then make some songs NAS

I am totaly for: 1. A good instrument/s (good pick-ups, good mics, cables) 2. A good audio interface (PCI or USB or FireWire you decide) 3. As perfect as possible headphones 4. Absolute conception about mixing, hearing, stereo image and sound!

Okay guys, thank you for your input. I can see that I need to be a little more specific. 1, Quality, I simply mean an end result that I like. So for the perfectionists among us let me say decent or perhaps even adequate. 2, Budget, the starting amount of $1000 would be for a soundcard/interface,4 mics and a monitors. Ambitious, perhaps but I'm an old school trader. 3, I will mainly be recording Gospel quartets, bluegrass, contemporary Christian and my kids stuff. 4, Any advice on where to look for info on studio design would be appreciated. 5, Please guys arguing amongst yourselves is really not conducive to what I am trying to do here, which is to enjoy making music in the company of friends and family. Thank you and God bless HT.

There's lots of good sites around, HTH :)

Thanks Shep. Good stuff.